Deep Shelter (31 page)

Session 22

M does not arrive. I receive a call at 2.30—he is in the West Country. He has taken my advice. He reports first feelings of tranquillity in a long time.

This was followed by a fortnight’s gap in the notes. As Easton, offstage, presumably strolled Piltbury Down, checked its standing stones and experimented with bomb-making while he got his head together. There were only two further sessions. Apparently Michael returned calmer. He had what Green described as “the unnerving tranquillity of a suicide risk.”

Belsey turned to the final entry.

Session 23

M tells me he is leaving treatment. Apologetic. This is the wrong place for him. Suggests he has found answers elsewhere. Misses the countryside since returning to London. Reports a new interest in nature. He speaks like someone who has never noticed it before. Has been spending time at the Botanic Gardens in Kew. Says they are teaching him patience. Plants emerge without trying. Everything breaks through eventually. Even government secrets have their own seasons—they will surface when it is time. In his dreams or someone else’s. In slips of the tongue.

Kew. So was this what he was doing there? Finding a new metaphor? There were no more notes—apart from an illegible scribble at the bottom of the page, a word that began with what looked like “Defe.” Deferral, perhaps. Or Defeat.

Belsey closed the notes. He wasn’t playing to his strengths. He was a detective; he needed something concrete.

Easton had been involved in at least one form of official employment. Connoisseur Catering. Belsey had seen the payments; Easton was caught in that web of the mundane that divides the living from the dead.

Belsey called the tax office. After ten minutes on hold he identified himself as a police officer and things went a little more briskly.

“I need some details in relation to a homicide investigation. Michael Easton, 6 July 1975. Has he got a National Insurance number?”

“Yes.”

Belsey took down the number. “What other details do you have?”

“Just one address. Been in the system since he turned sixteen.”

“Can I have it?”

The address was in Cumbria, in a town called Maryport on the Solway estuary, the very north-west coast of England: 27 Kirkby Terrace, Maryport. HMRC had the address registered in 1991 when Easton turned sixteen and they sent him his first National Insurance card.

That was the accent Belsey had picked up on the phone: not quite the twang of the north-east, a softer lilt. They still had a landline for the address. Belsey dialled and got through to a creaky-sounding woman who said the Eastons were the previous owners, a couple and their son. The parents died several years ago. The son sold her the house in February. That placed it around the time of Powell’s advert—a few weeks before Michael Easton’s foreign travels.

“Did you meet him?”

“Yes.”

“What was he like?”

“Nice. Polite.”

“Anything strange or suspicious?”

“No.”

“How did the parents die?” Belsey asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did he say why he was selling the house?”

“He didn’t need all that space for himself.”

“He was single?”

“I think so.”

Maryport had its own police station. The Sergeant was helpful; he’d known the Eastons.

“Ian was the grocer here. Had been for thirty years. Died three, four years ago.”

“How did he die?”

“Heart attack. He was on a walking holiday in Spain.”

“And his wife?”

“Cancer, I believe. A year earlier. Hit him hard.”

“Did you know the boy? Michael.”

“Not well. Only to see. Worked in the Waverley Hotel for a few years, I believe.”

“Was he ever in trouble with the law?”

“No, he was a quiet kid.”

He had left quietly too. The Sergeant had no idea where Easton had gone. He didn’t know anyone who would have kept in contact.

Belsey thanked him and said he might be in touch again. He studied the reunion advert, its dates, then the face to the right of centre. The dates would fit a father, but Ian Easton had been supplying Maryport with its fruit and veg until a few years ago. Everybody in the photo had died on the same day in November 1983. Belsey felt another potential solution slip beyond his grasp.

He called the General Register Office, got put through to Birth Records and asked what they had for Michael Easton, born 6 July 1975.

It took them five minutes to check their files and plunge him deeper into confusion.

“We don’t have a Michael Easton born that day.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

He had them search adjacent days in case there was some discrepancy logging it. But there was no Michael Easton. Undead. Unborn. Belsey thanked them for trying. When they had hung up he shut his eyes. He watched the patterns formed by his eyelids and thought of the deep shelter darkness and after a moment realised he was still holding the phone to his ear.

He put it down. Michael Easton didn’t enter this world. Not as Michael Easton, anyway. Maybe he arose from the tunnels, the soul of a dead soldier reborn, sending victims back like some kind of payment plan. There was another explanation, however, slowly emerging from between the clouds. Belsey looked at the magazine again. The man in the photograph was his biological father. Easton had been adopted.

He opened the phone’s browser, typed in
2nd Signal Brigade
then the date Hillier had given him for their deaths:
9 November 1983
.

Two hits.

The first was Powell’s advert preserved on the
Military Heritage
website. The issue had been digitised, an appeal suspended in cyberspace with its message pitched to the hearing of those who would understand. Only when Belsey clicked on it, the page was unavailable.

The second result came courtesy of the
Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Advertiser
:
Victory in Campaign for Memorial. Relatives Granted Ebsey Cemetery Site
. This web page was also currently unavailable. Belsey tried other pages from the newspaper and they worked fine.

He read the headline again then looked up Ebsey Cemetery. It was located outside a town called Shefford, an hour’s drive north of London. He retrieved a torn road atlas from beneath the passenger seat and tried to think of anywhere better to go.

BELSEY WONDERED WHAT HE WAS GOING TO DO IN A
cemetery. Interrogate the gravestones. While someone with an ambiguous relationship to existence fed him to the secret services. While they took his life apart, sitting on enough ammo and explosives to undo a few more while they were at it. Head to the graveyard, beat the rush. It was 7:05 p.m. Belsey kept the radio tuned to the news. No reporting about Kirsty Craik yet. Plenty on Jemma. “Police insist that, as things stand, this is a kidnap investigation and they have every reason to believe the victim is alive. They have what they describe as a ‘significant lead’ and expect to be able to give more information later this evening.” No suspect name released. Was that meant to be some kind of message directed at him? That there was still time to turn himself over to the forces of silence?

No mention of tunnels.

Belsey followed the cars driving away from the city, gliding through a sudden shower back to commuter-belt homes. He was the only one who turned off at the cemetery. The graves arrived before Shefford itself. They sat amid flat fields, beside an industrial works. He parked at the front gates. The rain stopped and the sun appeared, low in the sky. He climbed out.

The gates were open, the cemetery empty and disarmingly lush in the wet light. Rainwater dripped from branches, splashing in sawn-off bottles filled with dead stems. Headstones spread out from a new-looking crematorium in the centre. An older section of cemetery lay to its right, with softened crosses and stone seraphim. To the left were neater rows.

Belsey walked along the sleek modern avenues. Where would you place a memorial? He found an ivory-white Commonwealth War Graves Cross of Sacrifice in the far corner. Beyond it was a newer monument formed of two blocks of black granite. Each had rows of names leafed in gold. At the base was a plaque.

In Memory of the Thirty-Seven Individuals who Lost

Their Lives in the Air Accident of

9 November 1983.

They Gave Their Lives in the Service of Their Nation

Belsey looked down the engraved columns of surnames. Eady and Ellison, no Easton. He read the dedication again. It struck him as oblique, even by the standards of memorial plaques. Which of their nation’s many needs demanded their lives? Two steps led up to the memorial. A bouquet of white tulips lay on gravel at the top, petals starting to curl.

Belsey studied the flowers. They had been there more than forty-eight hours, less than five days. He turned the bouquet over and found a handwritten note in a plastic pocket.
Would whoever is leaving these flowers please contact me
? It gave a mobile number. It didn’t give a name. Belsey put the number into his new phone.

He dialled it halfway back to the gate.

“Hello?” a man answered.

“Hi,” Belsey said. His voice seemed loud. For some reason he wished he hadn’t called from inside the graveyard. “This is Detective Constable Nick Belsey. Who’s this?”

“Malcolm—Malcolm Walsh.”

“I’m at the memorial in Ebsey Cemetery. I saw this number with the flowers. I wanted to speak to someone about the accident.”

“Why? Do you know something?”

“Maybe.”

“Come to my place,” Malcolm said, quickly. He gave an address.

“I can be there in five. It’s not far from the cemetery.”

BELSEY FOLLOWED THE NAVIGATION
program on his new phone, past a cinema and bowling complex preparing to offer Shefford its entertainment for the night. The address he’d been given was part of a 1930s housing development, identical semi-detached homes arranged around a recreational ground. The houses gathered beside the thin grass, backs to the world. A few tried to fly a Union Jack in the breeze. He counted three cars with a
Support our Troops
sticker in the window.

A black van in Malcolm’s driveway advertised MW Roofing and Loft Conversion. A man in his fifties answered the door wearing a polo shirt displaying the same roofing company logo as the van. He was someone who had been well built and was now just large, with plaster in his hair and up his arms. He shook Belsey’s hand and pulled him into the house.

“Come in. I’m Malcolm Walsh. I just got back.”

Malcolm shut the door. Belsey wiped his feet. The inside of the house was catalogue clean. It smelt of oven chips. A strip of clear plastic led along the corridor to the front room.

“Take a seat in there. I’ll be with you in a minute,” Malcolm said.

Belsey sat on a pink sofa. Family photographs seemed to have reproduced themselves in the warm atmosphere, many in heart-shaped frames. He thought of Easton’s flat and its naive attempt at decoration. An attractive, thin-faced woman in her forties glanced in at him then disappeared. Belsey heard children’s voices, then an instruction to stay in their rooms.

Malcolm returned and drew the curtains. Belsey felt unprepared for whatever ritual was about to unfold.

“You said you knew something,” Malcolm said, taking an armchair, leaning forward.

“I said I wanted to talk to you.”

“What is this about?”

“There’s a possibility someone I’m investigating has connections with the brigade.”

“What kind of connections?”

“I don’t know. I need you to tell me what you know about the accident.”

“John’s on his way. He helps run the campaign. He lost his brother.”

“You lost your—?”

“Sister.”

“What exactly happened?”

“It was a Hercules plane, a C-130. It exploded over Montenegro.”

“Ninth of November 1983.”

“Yes.”

“What caused the explosion?”

“That’s what we’ve been trying to find out for thirty years.”

He kneaded his hands. There was a lot of nervous energy underneath the stocky exterior.

“Why did you want the person leaving flowers to call you?” Belsey asked.

“To see who they were. We spoke to everyone, all the relatives, and no one knew who was leaving those flowers. So obviously I wondered who they were and if they knew something.”

“Where were they going?” Belsey asked. “What were they doing on that flight?”

“It’s not clear. Officially it was for training. But training for what, we don’t know. They were being flown to Cyprus. First story we were given was that it was an R&R break.”

“Where in Cyprus?”

“Akrotiri. There’s a British army base there.”

“So why’s there been so much secrecy surrounding it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you come across this?” Belsey took the copy of
Military Heritage
from his jacket and passed it over. Malcolm’s eyes moved slowly between picture and text then back again. His mouth opened.

“That’s the photograph my sister sent. What kind of . . .”

“The number connects to a writer named Duncan Powell. Did you know him?”

“I’m the reason he has the photograph. I gave it to him to copy. He was here, writing about the crash for a book. What’s he done this for?”

It seemed Malcolm was unaware of Powell’s recent road accident. Belsey decided to keep the news to himself. The house had enough unexplained death in it for the moment.

“Maybe he wanted people who knew about it to get in touch,” Belsey said. “But he felt he had to be subtle. Maybe it was an advert intended for those who saw what was wrong with it. The date of the reunion is the anniversary of the accident.”

“Maybe.” Malcolm sounded unconvinced.

“When did Duncan Powell visit?”

Malcolm checked the date on the magazine. “Just before this. About a month before this. January.”

“What exactly did he say he was writing about?”

“The unanswered questions: the flight, the explosion.”

“Did he say anything else? About why he wanted to write about it now?”

“No. We told him he was wasting his time if he thought he could publish anything. It’s all covered by military confidentiality. The incident’s got a Defence Advisory Notice on it. It can’t be written about.”